The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In order for user devices to access services from service providers or attach to a network, the user devices need to discover or be discovered by an access node (AN), such as a cellular base station, a WiFi® access point (AP), or a mesh networking AP. Typically, user devices need to perform a discovery procedure and/or a network attachment procedure in order to be identified for search and management purposes. Discovery failures may occur, for example, when the AN lacks signaling resources or is otherwise overloaded; when a user device is located in a coverage hole, a coverage blind spot, or when the line of sight of AN is obstructed; and/or when the user device has limited transmitter capabilities due to size and/or power limitations.
Mesh networking can sometimes alleviate coverage hole or coverage blind spot issues. Mesh networking is a local networking topology in which network nodes, including networking elements (e.g., bridges, routers, switches, beacons, etc.), connect directly to as many other network nodes as possible in a non-hierarchical fashion. This network topology allows data to be routed efficiently between source and destination nodes using one or more paths. Mesh networks can employ point-to-point (P2P) or point-to-multipoint (P-MP) connections to exchange data.
One message relaying technique employed by mesh networks is “flooding” where a packet from a source node is propagated to all connected nodes, each of which broadcast the packet to other nodes in the network until the packet reaches the destination node. However, using flooding techniques may lead to network congestion due to packet collisions, especially in dense networks. Flooding can also be costly in terms of wasted bandwidth since packets have to be sent to every connected node. Additionally, packets can become duplicated in the network further increasing the load on the networks bandwidth as well as requiring an increase in processing complexity to disregard duplicate messages.
A message relaying technique employed by mesh networks is “routing” where a packet from a source node is propagated along a path by hopping from node to node until the packet reaches a destination node. To ensure that all paths are available, the network must allow for continuous connections and must reconfigure itself around broken paths using self-healing algorithms such as a Shortest Path Bridging algorithm. However, since routing techniques rely on paths between nodes to convey packets, the nodes in a wireless mesh network may need to be relatively close to one another to ensure that at least some paths are available. This may result in unnecessary device density, which may lead to interference and congestion issues.
One way to avoid these issues in routing-based mesh networks is to employ beacon devices, which forward or relay packets between nodes. However, most beacons typically have their receivers continuously active, requiring a more robust power supply than other nodes in the network. Additionally, most beacons are unable to discover the presence of unknown devices or devices located in coverage holes or blind spots since they are usually required to receive packets from known network nodes.